1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of asset information management for supply chains of partner organizations. In such a supply chain, as the individual partners acquire, finance, and service assets from one another, these assets are both used and transformed into other assets which may travel further in the supply chain. Information about these assets can be captured in a data store whenever individual asset-related transactions between partners are facilitated by an asset management system. Asset information in such a data store replaces physical inventory as the means of most competitively satisfying customer demand.
More particularly, the present invention is directed to an independent Internet accessible and web-based system and method for a hosted system that manages access to and reporting of supply chain asset information.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
Supply chain systems and asset information management systems are known in the art. These known systems employ a range of architectures, including, tightly coupled dedicated database systems and federated independent database systems to manage and share their asset information. But, regardless of the architecture of the database component of these systems, the asset information management functions of these existing supply chain systems are tightly coupled to other functions, such as procurement, sales, and accounting and the focus of existing systems has been to reflect the characteristics of physical inventory.
Taking an independent view of the information systems for managing assets across a supply chain, such systems must provide access to a broad spectrum of supply chain asset information to enable partner organizations who participate in the supply chain to manage their businesses and not just their own assets. Asset information systems have historically been directed to capturing and reporting information about such activities as purchasing, installation, leases, status, etc., with respect to the inventory of an organization's assets. Today, any information necessary for the management of a business is a candidate for inclusion in an asset information system, especially information about how these assets appear as they travel in their chains of suppliers. The range of asset information needed to manage an organization's business is considerably broader than an information about the organization's individual inventory of assets.
The suppliers and purchasers of assets participate as partners in many supply chains, each possibly as functionally broad as the range extending from raw material providers, to intermediate component manufacturers, to assemblers, to vendors, to trainers, to deliverers, to maintainers, to financers, and to remarketers. These functions are not necessarily all performed by different partners. Viewed from this perspective, these partners form an extended enterprise. This extended enterprise is linked by the asset information about their products and services as these products and services and information about them traverse possibly multiple supply chains, as well as subsequently as data to be mined for historical trends. Global data models and standard data management functionality form the foundation for the asset information management required by participants in such an extended enterprise. What is usually available is a conglomeration of different levels of detail and summary data created and stored to meet the specific needs of individual organizations and independent supply chains.
Most partners in supply chains also have functionally-oriented legacy systems for managing their businesses and their asset information. Few have historically provided external partners access to these internal systems and their information stores. This is true for independent businesses participating in a supply chain and it is just as true for vertically integrated businesses where different departments and divisions function in much the same manner as independent businesses, due to their cost center orientation.
These functionally specific internal legacy systems have evolved as either loosely or tightly coupled with asset information and asset management components. The architecture of such legacy asset management components varies from one system to the next but is ill-suited to electronic linking over the Internet, a requirement resulting from more and more demand being placed on participants to provide their partners in chains of suppliers with web-based access to their private asset information (for assets traversing the supply chain). Access to asset information and functions is needed by partners to enhance each partner's management of its business, e.g., to support contract, payable, and order management by each partner. For example, a partner who supplies raw materials has an aged inventory of such materials over time derived from purchases of raw materials from sources in anticipation of demand from partners and accounts payable resulting from these purchases; contracts with both sources and supply chain partners, and orders resulting from these contracts; etc. Access to partner information is needed by such a supply chain partner to manage contracts, orders, and payables and as well as to verify orders.
Externally, asset information management is expanding to include non-asset as well as asset information about supply chain partners and has grown in importance as more of each partner's success depends on this information, so much so, that functions such as inventory pipeline management and accounting are now subsidiary functions of asset management. The chain of suppliers involved in producing, financing, delivering and maintaining assets, i.e., the external extended enterprise, and the supply process itself are now the focal points of expanded asset management systems in which information has replaced inventory. Predictably, functionally oriented legacy systems cannot easily be changed to reflect this reordering of importance of functions or the shift to an external extended enterprise focus for the supply chain process. And in fact, existing internal systems have not accommodated this shift in focus. Internal legacy systems are almost never available to other supply chain partners because they include information that an organization does not want to share or make public, these systems were never intended to be externally accessible and are not sufficiently robust, and retrofitting such systems is either not economically attractive or not technically feasible, or both.
The extended enterprise exists by virtue of the Internet. The Internet has enabled business-to-business interaction and formation of relationships to take place at unprecedented speed and with incredible visibility. Maintaining this form of business interaction will require an ever-increasing and unprecedented level of information intimacy, currency, and reliability which most individual businesses are ill-prepared to undertake on their own.
Thus, there is a need for a reliable Internet-accessible system and a method to support management of assets across organizations and well as within them, a system and method which emphasize the asset information intensity and extended enterprise characteristics of Internet-based supply chains which extend across multiple enterprises and which intersect.